When I say that there's not much going on here, I mean it. It feels like one of those old Twilight Zone episodes where someone awakes from a coma to find the entire city is abandoned and/or frozen in time.
Today we rented cheap bikes and tooled around town, checking out the old colonial architecture and stopping to chat with people, including the curator of a paleontological museum whose enthusiasm trumped his limited English. We also arranged a trek for tomorrow with a local non-profit. Tomorrow night we'll hop across the Thai border and take an overnight bus to Bangkok for the final push of our trip -- southern Thailand or bust!
In the meantime, here are a few views of Laos.
For goats, all borders are porous (Vietnam-Laos crossing)
Rush hour, Savannakhet style
The enigmatic Loatian Psittacosaure (and its beak of parakeet)
Crumbling colonial architecture
Buddhas are cheaper by the dozen -- at the local workshop
Wonderful shuttered doors and windows -- and of course, motorbikes
That dinosaur is...cute. How funny.
ReplyDeleteAnd the town: sleepy, but with high speed internet!
The colonial buildings look like movie sets. Contributing to the weirdness...
ReplyDeleteYes, oddly, the highest speed internet so far has been on Cat Ba, the island in Halong Bay. And internet cafes are plentiful in many places, even in non-touristy areas, because kids go play video games on them.
ReplyDeleteIn life, they don't look like movie sets quite as much, but it does look like tumbleweeds might roll by them.